watercolor and pencil by Nancy Wait 2015

Me, dancing on my toes? I’d have to be dreaming. And actually I was. Dreaming I was in ballet shoes. Then, to my utter astonishment, my heels lifted off the ground and I was dancing en pointe! Even twirling a bit! My body felt light as a feather. There was no struggle, no pain, just this beautiful feeling of UP!

I might easily have forgotten the dream when I awoke.  It might have slipped away on gossamer wings as dreams often do, not being solid enough for this reality. But not this time. I know it was because of what I had been doing before I fell asleep. Uploading some files into my Dropbox. Ah… UP-loading…

And not just any files. These were from the course I am taking in the Quantum Light Programme at Rainbow Light Foundation.

It was one of those days when my foot had been cramping. I felt it when I got out of bed, and later that morning when I was riding the Path train to New Jersey. There were plenty of seats but I had to stand on the Path (train) to get the cramp out. A few hours later when I was home again I checked my email before heading off for a snooze, and saw the new course files had arrived from my tutor at Quantum Light. I was too dozy to read anything but the titles before uploading them for later.

The titles were as follows: “Current and Far Memory,” “Cellular Memory,” and “Positional Memory.” All three parts came under the heading of Module Five. (It struck me later how there are “five” “positions” in ballet…)

Ah, memory… Current or far, cellular or positional… you are there. Reminding me of the day half a century ago when I auditioned for the American School of Ballet. A plump, flat-footed ten-year old dreaming of becoming a ballerina.  Though I wasn’t athletic and had never been to a dance class, I was quite expressive as I danced and twirled and leapt around the living room to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, waving a long chiffon scarf in the air. I couldn’t manage a cartwheel or get my body to dive into the pool without doing a belly flop, but I had a feel for “the dance.”

Going to the open auditions at the ballet school was my mother’s idea. She said experience didn’t matter; they were looking for potential. Once we got there and I saw the other girls (hundreds of them) practicing at the bar – thin girls with long legs and long necks and long hair pulled tightly back in a bun, I must have known they wouldn’t pick me. The only surprise when the rejection letter arrived in the mail a few weeks later, was the information that I had flat feet. My mother didn’t believe it. She thought they’d made a mistake, and carted me off to the pediatrician to have the news refuted. Instead, it was confirmed. The doctor put on a grave face as he warned me that if I didn’t start wearing corrective shoes I would have backache in my fifties. This never happened. Instead of wearing corrective insteps I wore platform shoes and stilettoes. (And had cramp.)

But I would also carry with me the day I was taken into the interview room with George Balanchine. They all spoke Russian. I didn’t know what they were saying. I only knew that I was being studied and pointed at. My calves especially. I didn’t know who Balanchine was in those days, but later I saw his photo, and saw him on TV, and recognized him as the man who had touched my leg and found it wanting.

That was the end of my dancing ambitions. Though I made a go of it in small parts in musicals during my theatrical days, I lacked the necessary stamina as well as the correct bone structure. But never mind. Fifty-some years later my flat feet would go into vertical mode and spin me around. A beautiful dream, yes.

And maybe it was more than a dream. Maybe it was a memory, too. Because when I woke from my nap I remembered the titles – past life memories and such – of the Quantum Light materials that had arrived in my inbox, and I hurried off to take a look. To read how subconscious memories are held within the subtle energy fields. And soul memories exist at the cellular level, within the physical body…

I have no conscious memory as a ballerina in a past life. But the dream of dancing en pointe showed me that I knew how to do it. Whether or not my physical brain remembered, there was a memory in my light body. Perhaps a cellular memory of another time, another place. A memory of lightness, and being light on my feet, that was prodded into awareness the day I took the Path train to New Jersey and back, and had cramp, and uploaded some files about past life memory. Then closed my eyes and dreamed of lift-off and spin. The ease and familiarity, the joy of it!